Dear Prudence,
I have a low-stakes in the grand scheme of things, high-stakes in that my blood pressure cannot take it anymore question. I have your run-of-the-mill, overbearing in-laws. My husband is not close to them, and does not care if we spend any time with them beyond the occasional holiday/get-together, but they love our daughter and I don’t want to cut them off (…yet). We have slimmed down a lot of what we do with them, and also don’t let them have the baby overnight after several instances of inappropriate media choices/bedtimes 4+ hours past her actual bedtime—which feels pertinent in that there is a pattern of them feeling entirely comfortable completely ignoring us, even when the requests are extremely direct. We now see them once every other month-ish, and for the most part try to do things out of our house because Prudie, THEY WON’T LEAVE IF WE DON’T.
The last party we had where they were invited, they were the last guests by over an hour, and I was about two seconds away from being like “please leave,” which goes against every hospitable bone in my body. We try to limit these in-home activities, because oh my god, but how do we get them to leave when we have to have them over? We are hosting Christmas brunch this year, and are thinking of leaving the house as well “to take the dogs and children to the park for exercise,” when we need them to go in order to get them out, but I am having visions of them being like “FABULOUS! What’s the park’s address?” And I also don’t love that I have to leave my house on Christmas after hosting 12 people just so I am not beleaguered by couch potatoes till 11 p.m. Can you give us a couple of scripts to get them out the door? I’m tired of having to be a bouncer in my own home!
—It’s Effing Closing Time